The hardest part of making Get Together Girls for Italian filmmaker Vanessa Crocini
was viewing her footage after shooting it.

The personal stories of “street girls” from the slums of Nairobi,
Kenya, clutched at her heart.

“When you film, you pull yourself away from your emotions, and
those emotions come back to you even harder when you watch what you’ve filmed,”
Crocini said. “I would cry as I watched it.”

Nongovernmental organizations re­port that nearly 4 million
people live in Kenyan slums, with roughly half that number in Nairobi. In
total, more than half of the Kenyan population lives in urban slums, crammed
into housing made of mud and sheet metal and without access to the basic
utilities and services most Americans are used to.

Get Together Girls follows six young
Kenyan women — Monicah, Irene, Mary, Hellen, Teresia and Esther — as they
struggle to leave the slums behind with little more than their drive, a set of
sewing machines and an Italian mentor named Grazia Orsolato.

Crocini filmed much of the documentary in the quieter town of
Ngong, where Grace launched Get Together Girls to teach street girls practical
skills — sewing and design. Street girls are not prostitutes, but children
raised by slum-dwelling families or orphans who grow up in gangs of boys and
girls.

Orsolato was an affluent, white-collar professional working for
an Italian company. On vacations, she would often travel to Africa to volunteer
for humanitarian agencies working to rehabilitate the lives of hardscrabble
urban Afri­cans.

As time passed, the short, slight blond woman felt moved to make
an enormous change. She would save her money, moved to Kenya and spend the rest
of her life teaching young Africans a practical skill.

“She came to a place called Anita’s House,” Crocino said. Anita’s
House is one of many community-based rehabilitation homes. The residential
program takes girls ages 4 to 18 off the streets. In Anita’s Home, they attend
school and learn basic skills to integrate into more civilized living.

The genesis of the documentary was a different assignment in a
different part of Africa.

“I was in Rwanda during the production of the Alessandro Rocca
film The Consul’s List, and while we were working
there, we visited an orphanage,” Crocini said. “I also have a niece who was
adopted from Ethiopia, so I was familiar with the disadvantages girls can grow
up with in Africa. But it was while I was in Rwanda that I decided I would make
a film about African girls and how they struggle.”

Crocini said she wrote to a number of aid agencies asking for
contacts working in Africa. That e-mail led her to the founder of Get Together
Girls. Crocini said she clicked right away with Grazia Orsolato, who goes by
the nickname Grace.

“Grace is very pragmatic,” Crocini said. “She’s funny, and she’s
very strong, very determined. She made this huge change in her life to do this.
She left her life in Italy to be with these girls and help them change their
lives.”

Crocini traveled to Ngong in March 2011 to start working on the
film. She had to learn on the ground and in the moment.

“There were frustrations,” she said. “I was by myself. Three
weeks after I got there, I had this breakdown. I had to rely on myself. Some of
the girls who wanted to be in the project decided they didn’t want to be part
of the project, then they changed their minds.

“And when you’re a white person walking around with a camera in
Kenya, the people don’t always want you to be around. It’s because they’ve had
so many tourists come over from America and Europe and photograph them, like
they were animals.”

Crocini hooked an impressive executive producer, Italian rock
star Vasco Rossi, through a video she was working on in Italy, but she
approached the film with a shoestring-budget attitude.

She filmed on her own, often with a driver guiding her, one hand
on her shoulder, as she walked backward to get footage. She followed the young
women through the slums where their families often have to pay rent for sagging
housing on plots near open sewage. She filmed the women in the sewing room.

Life stories are stitched into scenes of Orsolato laying down the
law — setting consequences for tardiness and pushing the women to develop
professionalism along with design and tailoring skills.

“So many of these girls have difficult family situations,” Crocini
said. “They all have a lot to deal with. They had to learn some discipline.
Each one of the girls has had her ups and downs sometimes.”

Orsolato also opened a shop, and the young women manage some
business aspects of the shop. They take orders and create garments and handbags
to the client’s liking.

Part of the Get Together Girls program is investing in young
women, paying them “pocket” money so they can afford modest apartments and
setting them up to be independent working women.

It’s change on a kind of micro-level, Crocini said. The women
learn, one relationship at a time, that education means opportunity, and a job
means a future. They learn a lot about money; more work, done well, can mean
more money. More money translates into more fabric.

Crocini’s film went on the festival circuit in November. The
filmmaker is hoping for distribution. She’s now in Los Angeles.

For her, Crocini said, the film has been life-changing.

“When I told the girls that the film was going to be in festivals
in America, they were shocked. They didn’t think of themselves as interesting,”
she said.

To show their appreciation for Crocini, the young women designed
and made a dress for Crocini to wear at her premieres.

“For them, designing and making a dress for the filmmaker to wear
to the premiere was really special,” Crocini said.

And meanwhile, back in the small sewing room in Ngong, Grace
Orsolato adds a new girl to the program every year or so.

The steps might be small, Crocini said, but small steps still
bring each young woman a bit closer to economic independence.

Details: Individual tickets
cost $8 for adults, $6 for students, seniors and military personnel with ID.
For information about festival passes, schedules and more, visit
www.thinlinefilmfest.com. Buy tickets online at http://bit.ly/14khzw3. Tickets
will be available prior to screenings at the Campus Theatre box office.

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